


Lights Out

by BobRussellFan



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek Online, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: also the end of history, and discovery season 3 stuff, novelverse stuff here, this one is about getting stuck in the gears of the universe, welding it together a little?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:01:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27053059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BobRussellFan/pseuds/BobRussellFan
Summary: "Death is only the end if you think the story is about you."Just before the Burn - the last battle of the FTA.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been thinking about this one since I did the math - comment below!
> 
> SPOILERS for Season 3 of Discovery - sort of? 
> 
> A mix of Novelverse and canon characters, with some STO references thrown in.

3078  
The Eridian Vault  
20 minutes before the Burn

Timot Danlen was moving even before he stepped out the transporter beam, his ocular enhancements quickly tracking by spatial displacement even in the near-absolute zero of what had once been the center of the Federation Temporal Agency’s work. The reactor was still active, the better to power the security fields he’d quietly deactivated from his orbiting flyer, but life support had been off for a long, long time. 

It was damned cold - like stepping out onto the surface of an Andorian nature preserve, though of course if he’d come here unprepared he wouldn’t have had time to think that. Even with his nanotechnological treatments his body wouldn’t last unprotected in this cold forever, just long enough to accomplish his mission. He moved quickly, ice crunching beneath his feet, though not as much as he would have twenty-five subjective years earlier, when he’d gone back to a time that had seemed so much simpler - 

“I don't have any answers. And you're right, I shouldn't be here. Which means you shouldn't be here either, but you are. We are. We brought you here to protect the time line. We did quite a job.” 

In retrospect, it had been the greatest act of deception of his career, keeping the panicked thought of _Did I overshoot?_ off his lips even as he spun a chain of half-truths for Archer to keep him satisfied until he was able to really convince himself that yes, this long-dead Earth-strain human really was key to the history of the Anthropocene Galaxy - and to find a way to send him home. 

He found his destination and couldn’t help but repress a faint smile. The heavy duranium door in front of him wouldn’t have looked out of place in Archer’s time, but of course the deliberately anachronistic architecture concealed a variety of sensors that would have fooled the greatest burglars of centuries past. Luckily he didn’t need them. He took a small nanounit from his belt and fixed it to the panel underneath the door’s keypad, blowing on his hands by reflex for a moment as he watched the unit’s fibers reach out and intersect with the internal systems of the lock, pumping in just enough energy for him to type in his personal code on the door.

With maddening slowness, the clock in his head ticking, he watched the door grind open for the last time, revealing two things that didn’t belong in the last third of the 31st century. He expected the first one; a long-confiscated temporal vessel, a right rectangular prism that still glowed a faintly visible blue - and Special Agent Jena Noi, hand on her sidearm, giving him a sympathetic look. 

Her voice reached him by subdermal transmitter; one he’d never thought to use again. “Hello, Timot.” Jena looked subjectively older than the last time he’d seen her - the medicine of 24th century Earth being advanced for its time but far beyond what he’d had access to all his life; the product of an intergalactic civilization that was now threatened with annihilation. He put aside their friendship and went for his blaster; and a phaser blast zipped by his left ear. He took shelter behind the doorframe, his weapon in his hand. 

“So _this_ is your retirement?” he taunted her, hard betrayal edging his words. “Decided to leave a few things out of your neural tailoring?” That was why he’d taken retirement in the here and now - too many memories, too many aeons, to just be hidden away by a convenient alteration of his neurons. “Isn’t your husband going to miss you?” 

“I left a message for myself,” Noi said cooly, automatically taking shelter behind the machine. “Because I knew you’d do something stupid.” She tossed a sensor from her belt that landed on the ice wall behind Danlen - he turned and fired, cursing even as he heard her take a new position inside the storage room he couldn’t see. “And I’m just a temporal duplicate. Maybe the last one ever.” She laughed. “As far as my husband knows, I never left.” 

“You should have stayed!” He tossed in a sensor of his own and watched it burn just as hers had - was she behind the doorframe now? Maybe the left side? “You should have stayed in the past!” 

“So should you!” she called back. “Timot, the colonies remember your name. You could still be a hero! Come to Sarpedion or Golana if you want to keep your memories - you’re the man who saved Archer! Who saved the day at Kaleb IV! It doesn’t-have to be this way!” 

“I can’t believe you’d be so fucking _cowardly_!” Danlen spat back, daring a peek around the doorframe and getting another shot past his head - definitely by the machine. In a normal firefight, of course, back in the old days when temporal technology had quite literally been grafted into their bones, they’d have fought this very differently - sped up or slowed down, double or tripled into temporal duplicates - but now, as time quite literally ran out, there was just the two of them and the machine in front of Jena that could change everything. 

“Fuck you!” Jena called back, and he could hear how angry she was. Good - maybe she should be. “You’re the one throwing away everything we’ve ever believed in because you don’t like the hand we were dealt!” 

“The-we could stop it! We could stop it, Jena! My God, our people - our whole civilization! You saw the death counts when I did! Even a week’s warning could save the Federation!” 

“History doesn’t belong to us,” Jena said, repeating the same lessons they’d learned as young agents a subjective generation earlier, when the enemy was Augmented time-traveling cabalists from the 28th century - something that made sense. “We do not have the right to decide we are the peak of Galactic evolution!” 

“It’s not about that!” he fired back. “It’s about saving lives - the lives of _our_ people, our time! You know what's coming - a galaxy burning, extinction events everywhere; Andromeda gone dark - for all we know, it’ll hit the Kelvans too! We could be saving trillions of lives!” 

“So why stop here?” Noi demanded, her voice hard. “Why not stop the Romulan supernova? Or stop the Zhat Vash before the attack on Mars? Or the Carnelians before they go cannibal? Do we stop believing what we believe in just because it got hard for us?” 

“That’s…” Danlen closed his eyes, a lifetime of ethics, of hard, lived experience playing out behind the lids, before he opened them again and said, “Jena, I don’t think you want to shoot me.” He tossed out his phaser and then, greatly daring, stepped out from his cover, hands in the air. With cool discipline, Jena stepped out from behind the machine and aimed her phaser at him - tears in her eyes. 

“From the moment I met you,” he said, taking a step forward with every phrase, “I knew you cared about doing what’s right.” 

“Please, Tim,” Jena asked softly, but he kept speaking. 

“And saving lives-” She shot him in the chest. And Timot Danlen, the second to last member of the Federation Temporal Agency, fell to the ground, stunned. 

The temporal duplicate of Jena Noi walked up to the unconscious body of her former friend and let herself weep, the nanotech in her body keeping the tears from freezing solid before they left her eyes. “Dammit, Timot. Dammit…” It occurred to her that it would have been equally kind to kill him. But with a trillion deaths and more on her conscience-to-come, she found she couldn't add another to the list. 

She had planned to be up on the surface when the moment came, but she found she couldn’t leave Danlen - Daniels - Hunter - here. So she sat beside him next to the last time machine in the Milky Way (they had been _very_ thorough in the good old days, back before she’d decided to take the peace she deserved under her own personal vine and fig tree), and she accessed her own personal chronometer. Not much longer now. She thought of Dulmer, and Lucsly, and all she’d left behind back in the 24th century - and hoped her other self would have a wonderful life there with those she loved. 

"History really is a bitch, isn't it?" She laughed - and it was the last sound other than her own breathing she ever heard. It was good to laugh, here at the end of her time, and the beginning of a new one.

When the time came and the Burn ignited the dilithium in the Eridian Vault’s reactor, Jena Noi closed her eyes and smiled as a star blazed around her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Background notes

The idea here is that the Federation Temporal Agency has known about the Burn and its consequences for a long time. After all, they're time travelers - even if they can't visit their own subjective futures easily, there's enough to get a feel for what's going on. 

Being good ethical time cops, they made the decision not to interfere in their own history once they were sure it had nothing to do with the Temporal Cold War. So after they won the Temporal Wars they dismantled most of the Galaxy's time travel technology, then carefully distributed their agents into the past to live out the rest of their lives. 

Some took neural reconfiguring to settle down in recent past eras without knowledge of the coming future - like Jena Noi did. 

Others settled for colonies in the distant past - Sarpedion (scene of "Time For Yesterday" - maybe that's why they still had time travel tech in the 23rd century?) and Golana (the place where Molly O'Brien fell into an ancient time vortex on DS9.), and probably a few others. 

Timot Danlen (the name given for the Trek characters in the novels) decided he wasn't satisfied with just letting his civilization fall - he wanted to be a hero like Captain Archer or the player character from Star Trek Online, so he decided to do some tampering. Didn't work out, though!


End file.
